Hezbollah won’t meet with Carter

On Wednesday, a day after Carter landed in Beirut and said he would be willing to meet with Hezbollah officials if they were willing to meet with him, Hezbollah leaders said they would not meet with him.

The former U.S. president, who will travel on to Syria, was scheduled to meet in Beirut with political leaders to plan his Carter Center’s monitoring of the next Lebanese elections.

"I am going to meet with all of the political parties as possible," Carter said Tuesday. "I understand that several leaders of Hezbollah said they were not going to meet with any president or former president of the United States, so I don’t know yet."

Carter, who has been critical of what he says is the pro-Israel tilt of U.S. foreign policy, also will speak Dec. 12 at the American University in Beirut on "30 years after Camp David: A memo to the Arab World, Israel and the Quartet." Carter brokered the Camp David Egypt-Israel peace accords. The Quartet refers to the grouping of the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union that guides the current Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Carter will meet in Syria with President Bashar Assad "to discuss the prospects for peace in the Middle East," according to a statement from the Atlanta-based Carter Center, the human rights group he established and still leads. Carter was widely criticized in April when he met in Syria with the exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal. The United States labels Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist organizations.

Israel and Syria have been negotiating peace indirectly under Turkish auspices but without the encouragement of the Bush administration, which regards Syria as a terrorist-backing rogue nation.

A number of dovish pro-Israel peace activists and groups in the United States are pressing President-elect Barack Obama to give priority to Israel-Syria talks, saying the Israeli-Palestinian track is intractable for now.